ESCAPE OAKLAND
Around a year ago my family decided that in the busyness of our lives, we needed to have a day together. Now, of course, that entailed an escape room on the agenda. We decided to try somewhere that we had never been before, which is how we landed on 7th Street’s Escape Oakland. We ended up doing their esteemed Alchemist room and did in fact escape with approximately 0.2 seconds left on the clock. So, I think it’s safe to say that we are not the most well-paced team. Furthermore, when I decided that I wanted to research the interworking of various Bay Area rooms, I knew that I needed to go back to get the insider scoop on their games.
When Tyler Florence, one of Escape Oakland’s Game Masters, took me to their control room which is essentially the heart of their games, I immediately knew that there was fun-loving and enthusiastic energy put into their games. The room was filled with fun props and the walls were scattered with colorful posters and flags. Among these decorative additions, however, housed the key component of their games: a remotely activated puzzle system.
“We have four games and for each of the games we have a physical room and then the code for the room… We can remotely activate any of the puzzles which is apparently not very common. Other escape rooms can lock or unlock but we can activate it from [the control room,]” Tyler said.
Tyler explained that there are different generations of escape rooms. Generation one is analog locks which is what’s typically the most well-known. Generation two has some electronic components but no electronic locks so, for example, a light may turn on or off at some point during the game. And lastly, Escape Oakland’s preference, generation three is electronic and computer activation.
​
While we started to talk more about the code that programs their games, a team came in to tackle their Society room. Tyler let me watch as he started the system that resets the computer-activated clues. He showed me the smaller computers that they use to run the rooms, and it turns out that a recent global event has had an unexpected impact on Escape Oakland’s electronic programming. In fact, it even put a wrench in their plans to expand the business last year.
​
“These little computers are made by a company in Siberia so, because of the embargoes on Russia, the war in Ukraine has had a surprising impact on our business because these are what we use to make our escape rooms,” Tyler said.
Apparently, the space was already an escape room before Escape Oakland bought and renovated it, which is why the floor plans in each of the rooms are different. Tyler told me that his favorite room is their Alchemist game because “it’s the only room where you're not under the threat of death.”
What really interested me about their high-tech system is that the program used for each of the rooms is able to detect the potential at which a team can solve one of the puzzles.
“The red [square on the screen] means they can’t solve it yet, the yellow means it is solvable but they haven’t solved it, and the green means they have.”
In order to fully get a sense of how their system operates, Tyler said that because they were having a slow evening, he would do one of the rooms by himself and I could watch from the monitor.
While he was playing the room, I got a chance to speak to another Game Master, Jenna Browning. Jenna moved to California from Washington and, while she knew that she wanted to work in escape rooms, she settled on Escape Oakland because she decidedly “liked the people here best.”
“When you’re learning [the computer system] it can be hard but we basically have these sheets that remind us what we need to reset in each room but it probably takes around 5-10 minutes to reset each room,” Jenna said.
We talked about the different types of escape rooms that we had played and I mentioned that I had done a room titled “the psycho dentist” in Santa Barbara where one of the employees, dressed as the frightening character, jumped out at the end when we failed to escape. Jenna mentioned that she was definitely no stranger to horror-themed games as she used to work at a haunted house, however, to my relief,
Escape Oakland does not have any thriller-type rooms.
Tyler returned, having completed the room in around 12 minutes, a personal best apparently. He said that, for the most part, people expect him to be a “master” at escape rooms, however, he says that working at an escape room, he really just has a better sense of how to respect other escape businesses’ rooms.
“When I did all of these rooms for the first time, I only escaped from one of them within the time frame and it was Alchemist with 20 seconds left,” Tyler said.
We then looked over to the monitor and saw that the team in The Society was still struggling to escape. I wondered if they had the same motto as Palace Games where they feel that their place is to hint but not help.
“What we don’t want to do is be like [other] escape rooms I’ve been to where [you’re] stuck and they just give you the same clue over and over again which is pretty unhelpful… I always think, well we’re gonna need more than that… I know some places have a button that unlocks the puzzle but, [with our system,] you push the button to actually solve it which allows [the team] to go to the next step,” Jenna said.
As the one-hour timer went off, the group looked a little defeated as they had failed to escape; however, since they were the last team before closing, Jenna decided that she would walk them through the rest of the puzzles for fun.
While I was only at Escape Oakland for around an hour and a half, I could instantly feel the positive energy from the employees as well as get a sense for their various intricate and tech-based games.